Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@(protected):

>> unpack gpm-1.20.3.tar.lzma: file format not recognized. Ignoring.
>
> There was a post earlier today about this very thing. Check today's
> inbox for more details. Apparently you need a very recent portage to
> use this feature, so I would suggest you fully resolve the bash/portage
> thing first before trying to emerge world

Alan, you seem willing and patient enough to put up with my poor
reporting.  Thanks.

So keeping you up on what I've done... if you are willing to stay
with it a bit longer...

I've so badly tortured that poor 2006 based vmappliance... I've
scotched that attempt ... now booting the vmware app as is. That is
at what was at one time an uptodate 2006 based install.

I'm going to try a saner approach to getting it updated. I thought
the first move would be to set the make.profile to 2007 then
emerge --sync

From there... I plan to follow your suggestion and emerge a newer
kernel... and see if it still boots.

I will report further at that point.

--
gentoo-user@(protected)